CCP Games, the world’s leading independent massively multiplayer game studio, has announced their award-winning, sci-fi MMO EVE Online had surpassed the 500,000 subscriber mark worldwide for the first time in the game’s history. The milestone continues ten consecutive years of subscriber growth and follows the December 4 release of EVE Online: Retribution, the game’s 18th free expansion and its most successful ever.

The latest research from Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), titled "Unified Communications: Gaining a Competitive Advantage While on the Move," confirms the measurable business value of Unified Communications (UC). By streamlining internal and external communications, maximizing telecom spend, increasing productivity through improved collaboration, and reducing customer churn through increased customer responsiveness, 79% of the top performers achieved a break-even return on their UC investment within the first 12 months.

The research study, which surveyed over 150 organizations, also found that the broad acceptance of mobility in the enterprise has made it the most reliable way to contact an individual, and the need to integrate mobility into the larger organization’s communications infrastructure emerged as one of the primary drivers for increased UC adoption.

Among the study respondents, the top-performing organizations increased knowledge sharing among the workforce by 35%, increased workplace flexibility by 35%, improved their organization’s competitive performance by 25%, increased collaboration for decision making by 16%, and accelerated their speed of conflict resolution by 11%.

"Unified Communications holds enormous promise as a coherent approach to business communications, as a way to cut through ’communications clutter,’ and more directly connect a customer to a company, employee to employee, and more tightly bind business partners and suppliers," said Andrew Borg, senior research analyst, Aberdeen Group. "The challenge of our connected era is that the greater the number of communications options, the more difficult it can be to connect with a specific individual when you want to. UC therefore becomes increasingly important to mend the fractured digital communications landscape."

Honda Motor Co., Ltd. has further advanced intelligence technologies enabling its advanced humanoid robot ASIMO to act autonomously and perform uninterrupted service to office guests. Honda developed an intelligence technology that enhances smooth movement by enabling ASIMO to choose between stepping back and yielding the right-of-way or continuing to walk based on the predicted movement of oncoming people.